Plan with tolls on expanded 1604, 281 approved

Updated 11:54 pm, Monday, June 25, 2012

If county Commissioners, including Kevin Wolff and Tommy Adkisson (shown at an MPO meeting last month), want efficiency, then they should consider merging RMA and VIA.

If county Commissioners, including Kevin Wolff and Tommy Adkisson (shown at an MPO meeting last month), want efficiency, then they should consider merging RMA and VIA.

Photo: Julysa Sosa, San Antonio Express-News

Plan with tolls on expanded 1604, 281 approved

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The region's transportation planning organization approved a proposal to expand Loop 1604 and U.S. 281 with a mix of nontoll and toll lanes Monday, but only after Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Adkisson threatened to approve just a part of the proposition and table the rest.

Adkisson, who is chairman of the Metropolitan Planning Organization, made a motion to approve using $146.8 million in state money to expand Loop 1604 with nontoll lanes, rather than vote on a $368.8 million plan that included the state money and local leveraging dollars, plus some toll lanes.

Officials now commonly refer to those as managed lanes: free for buses and carpools but not for drivers in single-occupancy vehicles.

Other MPO board members said they expected to vote on the entire plan Monday, and not just the state dollars for Loop 1604.

But after a tense two hours of discussion, including several volleys between Adkisson and TxDOT San Antonio District Engineer Mario Medina, the chairman eventually chose to support the broader plan, following an amendment to his original motion made by County Commissioner Kevin Wolff.

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“I'm the fulcrum in this thing,” Adkisson said after the vote, adding he believed that it was his opposition to tolls that helped bring about a plan that included more nontoll lanes than previously expected.

“I wanted to push back so that we could get the maximum deal,” he said.

In the end, the motion to support the broader plan of toll and nontoll projects passed 14-1, with state Rep. Joe Farias, D-San Antonio, casting the lone no vote.

Farias, who opposes toll roads, said he wanted to table the vote until the board could more carefully consider a resolution made by the Advanced Transportation District board at a special meeting Friday regarding the 1604/281 plan. At that meeting, the board of the ATD — which oversees a quarter-cent sales tax for transportation projects — approved allocation of $100 million in ATD revenue, but with several conditions, including that managed lanes on U.S. 281 also be free for buses and directly connect to a planned VIA Metropolitan Transit park-and-ride. The VIA and the ATD board are one and the same.

The ATD resolution, Farias said, was never discussed at previous meetings about the larger 1604/281 expansion plan.

“It's not good business to do stuff like that,” he said.

Monday's meeting was a bizarre one, riddled with confusion about what board members were actually approving and an underlying theme of political dealing and posturing.

TxDOT officials tried to emphasize the consequences of not approving the larger proposal: A nay vote would not eliminate tolls from the MPO's future plans. It also could have endangered the $146.8 million that the Texas Transportation Commission allocated to the San Antonio region in April. That allocation doesn't become final until the commission votes again Thursday.

Without the plan, added Medina, the district engineer, all new expressways on U.S. 281 and on Loop 1604 would be tolled.

What's clear is that some version of toll projects are coming to Bexar County:

An expressway on U.S. 281, from Loop 1604 to Stone Oak Boulevard, that includes four nontoll lanes and one or two managed lanes in the center. The parts of the corridor that are nontoll today will remain free.

The MPO plan still includes tolls as the way to pay for added lane capacity on U.S. 281 from Stone Oak Boulevard to Borgfeld Road at the county line.

An expressway on Loop 1604, from Bandera Road to Potranco Boulevard, that would include four nontoll lanes. Managed lanes will likely be built on this part of the corridor in the future as more capacity is needed, but that probably won't be for eight to 10 years, Medina said. As on U.S. 281, the parts of the corridor that are nontoll today also will remain free. Work could begin by next summer.

But, Medina said, plans will soon move forward to add toll lanes on Loop 1604 from Bandera Road to just past U.S. 281, pending the expected approval of a federal environmental study on the corridor in January. The expressways on this stretch of the corridor that are free to drive today will remain that way.

Toll-road opponent Terri Hall, representing her group Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom, decried the MPO board and TxDOT officials, saying they had misled the public with their plans. She was “shocked” by Adkisson's vote, but added it was Wolff who “opened the door” to the proposal's passage by amending the chairman's original motion.

“Now we are looking at a litany of legal challenges,” Hall said. She declined to elaborate on what those could be.